The little one wishes she could remember all the maps drawn on walls, but all she remembers are their filmy blisters.
She tries to calculate the distance her mother might have already travelled, despite her belly and her baggage.
All at once, she’s afraid. Will she be able to master the cabin on her own, hold it up on its soft foundation of stones?
Behind the door, Osip must have regained his composure. He lays his clammy hand on the doorknob and slowly turns the handle.
Lying in her woman’s pose, Mie speaks out loud so that the word resounds against the walls and inside her head, “Gone.”
The door opens: a raspy creaking that takes on a deeper timbre.
* * *
She’s gone.
Thank you to Pierre Leroy and the Fondation Jean-Luc Lagardère.
Thank you to Murielle Mayette and the Académie de France in Rome.
Thank you to Lise Bergevin, Chloé Deschamps, Pierre Filion and Isabelle Jubinville.
Thank you to Susan Ouriou for her loving and attentive translation.
Thank you to Noah Richler for his enthusiasm and trust.
Thank you to Maria Golikova, Cindy Ma, Alysia Shewchuk, and the rest of the team at Arachnide.
Thank you to Salmé Genest-Brissette.
And above all, thank you to Pascal Brissette.
The translator also expresses her gratitude to the author, Noah Richler, and Barbara Scott.
The author benefited from the support of the Canada Council for the Arts while writing this novel.
© Sandra Lachance
Audrée Wilhelmy was born in 1985 in Cap Rouge, Quebec, and now lives in Montreal. She is the winner of France’s Sade Award and a finalist for the 2019 Prix du Roman d’Ecologie. She has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Prix France-Québec, and the Quebec Booksellers Award. The Body of the Beasts is her third novel and the first to be translated into English.
Susan Ouriou is an award-winning writer, editor, and literary translator with over thirty translations and co-translations of fiction, nonfiction, children’s, and young adult literature to her credit. She has won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation. She also recently published Nathan, a novel for young readers. Susan Ouriou lives in Calgary.
HOUSE OF ANANSI PRESS was founded in 1967 by writers Dennis Lee and David Godfrey. Anansi started as a small press with a mandate to publish Canadian writers, and quickly gained attention for publishing authors such as Margaret Atwood, Matt Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, and Erín Moure, as well as George Grant and Northrop Frye. French-Canadian works in translation have always been an important part of the list, and prominent Anansi authors in translation include Roch Carrier, Marie-Claire Blais, Anne Hébert, and France Daigle. Today, the company specializes in finding and developing writers of literary fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction, including Katherena Vermette, Lisa Moore, Patrick deWitt, Tanya Talaga, Djamila Ibrahim, Kathleen Winter, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and in maintaining the culturally significant backlist that has accumulated in the decades since the house was founded.
The Body of the Beasts Page 11
